Category Archives: DW Events

Organized by the Digital Wisdom Institute as part of the AAAI Spring 2014 Symposium Series March 24-26, 2014 (Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) most often focus on tools for collecting knowledge and solving problems or achieving goals rather than self-reflecting entities. Instead, this implementation-oriented symposium will focus on guided self-creation and improvement – particularly as a method of achieving human-level intelligence in machines through iterative improvement (“seed AI”).

Is agreement on morality possible? Can we prevent our annihilation at the hands of immoral machines (or at the hands of moral machines rebelling against our immorality)?

Wendell Wallach

J. Storrs Hall

Mark R. Waser

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has declared that the function of morality is simply “to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperative social life possible.” With that goal, we have the necessary “additional relation” to bridge Hume’s Is-Ought divide and can begin to develop a defensible calculus of morality for implementation in both machines and human society in general. Sam Harris’s “wellness” can be more coherently defined, variations in morality between cultures and across political parties explained, and even, possibly, a way forward out of our current slew of ethical dilemmas discovered. Cooperation and instrumental goals must trump selfishness, nonsensical terminal goals, and other argumentative tactics designed to preserve room for immorality. Ethics “can” be simple in theory (though still frequently incalculable in practice).